Photo:
Prof Deborah Lipstadt exultant outside the British
High Court in April 2000, surrounded by her lawyers
(far right, the Zionist zealot James Libson): they
spent $10m raised by her backers to defeat Mr
Irving's claim -- most of it on paying "experts" to
give opinions on his works.

A woman of
valor

by Dan Markel,The Jerusalem Post

UNTIL only a few years ago, a
veneer of respectability attached in some scholarly
circles to the historical writings of David Irving.
Famous historians such as Sir
John
Keegan and Professor
Gordon Craig [letter, right] viewed
Irving's works as indispensable to understanding
the full nature of World War II.

Nonetheless, Irving's statement that "more women
died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's
car at Chappaquiddick
than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz,"
among others, frustrated, if not outraged, all but
the community of
Holocaust-deniers in
which Irving had ensconced himself.

In 1993, Emory University Professor Deborah
Lipstadt wrote [sic.
published] Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, a book in
which, among other things, she accused Irving of
writing nothing more than gussied-up anti-Semitic
pap that sought to
deny the truth of
Hitler's involvement in the plan to murder European
Jewry.

This choice of venue was both significant and
unsurprising because, unlike the United States,
England places the burden of proof upon
defendants.

Moreover, England, unlike the United States, did
not require a public figure like Irving to prove
that Lipstadt made her allegedly defamatory
statements with "actual malice." Thus, while a suit
against Lipstadt would likely not have even
surfaced in America, it required incredible labor
on the defendant's part in England.

As
Lipstadt's lawyer, Anthony Julius, left,
described the task, the defense had to show that
Irving "subordinated the truth to spread
anti-Semitism and engender sympathy for the Third
Reich."

Although Lipstadt's account of the trial focuses
on the many falsehoods underlying Irving's works,
she begins with a gripping narrative of her own
journey into academia and the origins of this
lawsuit.

THE DAUGHTER of modern Orthodox parents, Lipstadt
grew up in New York's Upper West Side. Prior to
graduate school, she travelled to Israel in 1966 to
study at Hebrew University.

Despondent that, at that time (on account of
Jordan's closure of the border to Jewish tourists)
she was unable to visit Jerusalem's Old City,
Lipstadt trekked to Greece to obtain a new passport
from the American Embassy there.

She eliminated all traces of the Israeli origins
of her trip, and sojourned from there to Lebanon,
Syria, and Jordan to the Old City.

Upon her return to Israel through the Mandelbaum
Gate, the Israeli border guards remarked that
Lipstadt had guts, but maybe no sechel
(intelligence).

Five years later, after starting her graduate
work at Brandeis, Lipstadt again entered the lion's
den, travelling to the Soviet Union in 1972 to meet
Jewish refuseniks and help prepare the groundwork
for their possible emigration to Israel.

This time, upon the
KGB's confrontation with accusations of
"spreading lies about the Soviet regime,"
Lipstadt wisely accepted their "invitation" to
leave the country.

These two tales of youthful pluck and pragmatism
serve as windows into Lipstadt's ultimate decision
to fight the Irving libel accusations rather than
save five years of time, emotional toil and expense
by simply issuing a retraction and apology.

With the commendable support of her university,
her publisher, and
philanthropists from
around the world, Lipstadt assembled a first-rate
team of historians and advocates to show the
forensic basis for Irving's deliberate distortions
of the historical record. (To that end, interested
persons may find an array of relevant materials on
the Holocaust Denial on Trial website:
www.hdot.org.)

History on Trial not only captures the
excitement and occasional despair of the team's
ordeal in preparing for and enduring the 10-week
trial. It also trenchantly exposes the implications
of the team's victory for historians and their
readers.

Lipstadt's book, then, functions as far more
than a mere "case for the Holocaust." It serves as
an introduction to the historian's craft and the
kinds of disputes in which reasonable historians
engage.

For example, at the outset Lipstadt makes plain
that various aspects of the Holocaust are the
subject of legitimate and competing historical
interpretations, and that it was not her goal,
either in her scholarship or at the trial, to shut
down rivalling understandings, say, of whether
Hitler wanted to take power to eliminate European
Jewry or whether Nazi officers in the East
"initiated the murders" of the Jews for functional
reasons -- murders which were subsequently ratified
by Hitler's approval.

While one might think
this admonition is overcautious, it turns out
that this reminder was vitally important because
certain well-known historians improperly
chastised Lipstadt about the purported "chilling
effect" inflicted by her hard-fought
victory.

Their concern is arrant tripe. After all, it was
Irving who brought suit against Lipstadt and her
publisher; Lipstadt never
sought to silence Irving
[see Website
dossiers: 1,
2]

She simply published her views, which undermined
Irving's denials of the Holocaust's nature and
scope, and showed that his rendition of history was
no more than distortions in service to an extremist
ideology.

Indeed, the more limited nature of Lipstadt's
ambition is what enabled two vigorous free-speech
advocates -- Anthony Lewis (formerly of the
New York Times), and Harvard Law School's
Alan Dershowitz -- to write an introduction
and afterword, respectively, on Lipstadt's
behalf.

In any event, Lipstadt's memoir of her
experience as a defendant is one of the best
general-interest books I've read in years. It is
not only instructive, provocative and riveting --
it is inspiring. History on Trial has earned a
well-deserved place in every home that cares about
truth, and about the courage to speak it.

The writer is a lawyer in Washington
D.C. His writing can be found at
www.danmarkel.com.

Dershowitz:
U.S. Needs Improved Torture Tactics:
"Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who
urged that terrorists be tortured in a Nov. 2001
column he wrote for the Los Angeles
Times, isn't backing away from his position
one bit in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison
scandal."